Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (16 page)

The stages by which Lenin created this autocracy are worth describing in a little detail because they became the grim model, in essentials, for so many other regimes in the six decades which have followed. His aims were fourfold. First, to destroy all opposition outside the party; second, to place all power, including government, in party hands; third, to destroy all opposition within the party; fourth, to concentrate all power in the party in himself and those he chose to associate with him. As with the constitution-making and the creation of the USSR, all four objects were pursued simultaneously, though some were attained more quickly than others.

The elimination of all non-party opposition posed few problems once Lenin had got the Cheka organized. The 1918 constitution, drafted by Stalin on Lenin’s instructions, embodied ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’, which Lenin once brutally described as ‘a special kind of cudgel, nothing else’.
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It contained no constitutional safeguards and gave nobody any rights against the state. The power of the state was unlimited, indivisible – no separation of legislative and executive function, no independent judiciary – and absolute. Lenin scorned the antithesis between the individual and the state as the heresy of the class society. In a classless society, the individual
was
the state, so how could they be in conflict, unless of course the individual were a state enemy? Hence there was no such thing as equality of rights; or one man, one vote. In fact, voting for the All-Russian Congress of Soviets contained a fundamental gerrymander, in that city Soviets elected a legate for every 25,000 voters, whereas rural ones (where the Bolsheviks were weaker) had a deputy for every 125,000 inhabitants. In any case entire categories of people, as well as countless individuals, were denied the vote (and all other civil ‘privileges’) altogether, and the constitution listed among its ‘general principles’ the laconic observation: ‘In the general interest of the working class, [the state] deprives individuals or separate groups of any privileges which may be used by them to the detriment of the socialist revolution.’
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Though the Bolsheviks controlled all ‘representative’ organs from the early weeks of 1918 onwards, opposition politicians lingered on for a time, though thousands were shot during the civil war. In May 1920 members of a British Labour delegation visiting Moscow were
allowed, according to Bertrand Russell, ‘complete freedom to see politicians of opposition parties’.
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Six months later, the eighth All-Russian Congress of Soviets was the last to admit delegates calling themselves Mensheviks or Social Revolutionaries, and even these had long since lost all voting rights. By then Martov, the only remaining Social Democrat of consequence, had left Russia and had denounced Bolshevism at the Halle congress of independent German socialists.

The last real challenge to the regime from outside the party came from the Kronstadt mutiny of 28 February 1921, which began on the battleship
Petropavlovsk.
The sailors had always been the revolutionary hotheads. They actually believed in freedom and equality. They foolishly supposed Lenin did so as well. Had they followed the advice of the few ex-Imperial officers left in the navy, they would have established a bridgehead on the mainland (Petrograd was seventeen miles away) and spread the revolt to the capital, pressing their demands by force. That might have entailed the end of the regime, for by early 1921 Bolshevism was universally unpopular, as the sailors’ grievances indicated. In fact they amounted to a total indictment of the regime. They asked for the election of Soviets by secret ballot, instead of ‘show of hands’ at ‘mass meetings’; and free campaigning by the rival candidates. They denounced all existing Soviets as unrepresentative. They called for freedom of speech and of the press for ‘workers, peasants, the anarchist and the Left socialist parties’, free trade unions, freedom of assembly, the formation of peasants’ unions, the freeing of ‘all socialist political prisoners’ and anyone imprisoned ‘in connection with workers’ and peasants’ movements’, the setting up of a commission to review the cases of all those in prison or concentration camps, the abolition of ‘political departments’ in the army, navy and public transport, since ‘no one party can enjoy privileges for the propaganda of its ideas and receive money from the state for this purpose’, and, lastly, the right of the peasants to ‘do as they please with all the land’. What they were objecting to, in short, was virtually everything Lenin had done since he came to power. They were naive, to put it mildly, to assume that any single one of their demands would be granted except over gun-barrels, or indeed over Lenin’s dead body.

The failure of the sailors to spread revolt to the mainland allowed the regime to get itself organized. The fortress was stormed across the ice on 18 March, Tukhachevsky, who was in charge, using young Army cadets from the military schools, who had to be driven at pistol-point by a body of 200 desperate Bolsheviks drafted from the tenth Party Congress. The regime’s line was that the mutiny had been organized from abroad by White Guards and led by Tsarist ex-officers.
No public trials were held but Lenin carefully selected for publication a list of thirteen ‘ringleaders’, which included a former priest, five ex-officers and seven peasants. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, were murdered after the mutiny was crushed, though the details will probably never be known: the episode had been entombed by official Soviet historiography beneath a massive pyramid of lies.
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Once the mutiny was crushed, Lenin determined he would no longer tolerate any form of political activity outside the party. All those, he said, who were not in the party were ‘nothing else but Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries dressed up in modern, Kronstadt, non-party attire’. Such creatures, he added, ‘we shall either keep safely in prison or send them to Martov in Berlin for the free enjoyment of all the amenities of free democracy’.
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After this declaration, in May 1921, the Cheka quickly moved in to break up any remaining Social Democrat activity; that summer marked the extinction of visible political opposition in Lenin’s state. He had given non-Communists the choice that still faces them today sixty years later: acquiescent silence, prison or exile.

At the same time the process began whereby party membership became essential to the holding of any important position in the state and its endlessly proliferating organs. ‘As the governing party,’ wrote Lenin in 1921, ‘we could not help fusing the Soviet “authorities” with the party “authorities” – with us they are fused, and they will be.’
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And Kamenev: ‘We administer Russia and it is only through Communists that we can administer it.’ Party members were instructed to take over ‘the network of the state administration (railways, food supplies, control, army, law-courts etc.)’, trade unions, and all factories and workshops, even public baths and dining rooms and other welfare organs, schools and housing committees. In every sphere they were to constitute ‘organized fractions’ and ‘vote solidly together’.
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Communist Party membership was now essential to getting on; the party had swollen from 23,600 in 1917 to 585,000 at the beginning of 1921. From this point date the first systematic efforts to screen party members (a ‘central verification committee’ was set up in October), expel those lacking in zeal, subservience or connections, and turn the party card into a valuable privilege, to be earned.
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Thus there came into being what is, perhaps, the most important single characteristic of the Communist totalitarian state: the hierarchy of party organs in town, district, region and republic, placed at each level in authority over the corresponding organs of the state. The ‘vanguardism’ of the Revolution was now transformed into the ‘vanguardism’ of perpetual rule, the party becoming and remaining
what Lenin called the ‘leading and directing force’ in Soviet society. Nowhere was party control more marked than in the central government, and in Sovnarkom itself, which was in theory answerable to the Soviets. S.Lieberman, one of the ‘experts’ employed by Lenin, testified that, by 1921–2, the two key government departments, the Council of People’s Commissars and the Council of Labour and Defence, were already mere rubber-stamps for decisions taken within the party.
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Lydia Bach, who studied the process at the time, wrote in 1923 that Sovnarkom, ‘having ceased to be a body with a will of its own, does nothing but register automatically decisions taken elsewhere and place its seal on them’.
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Lenin had thus displaced one ruling class by another, the party. The ‘new class’ which the Yugoslav dissident Communist Milovan Djilas denounced in the 1950s was already in existence by 1921–2. But if the ‘vanguard élite’, now half a million strong, ultimately to be fifteen million, enjoyed privileges, even administrative authority, it did not share real power. That was to be the sole right of an inner vanguard, a secret élite. One of the most depressing features of the Lenin regime, as Rosa Luxemburg had feared, was the almost conscious reproduction of the very worst features of Tsardom. The Tsars, too, had periodically experimented with ‘responsible government’, a cabinet system like Sovnarkom. Peter the Great had had his ‘Senate’, Alexander I his ‘Committee of Ministers’ in 1802, Alexander II his ‘Council of Ministers’ in 1857, and there had been another such body in 1905.
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In each case, the combination of autocracy plus bureaucracy wrecked the system, as the Tsar dealt privately with individual ministers instead of allowing the cabinet to function. The whiff of Divine Right was too strong in the Tsar’s nostrils, just as now the whiff of History, and its handmaiden the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, was too strong in Lenin’s.
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When it came to the point, he did not want ‘responsible government’, any more than he wanted any kind of legal, constitutional or democratic restraints on his decisions.

This meant crushing all opposition within the party, the third stage in the building of Lenin’s autocracy. To do Lenin justice, he had always made it clear that he believed in a small, centralized party, with real decisions in the hands of a very few. He had set this all down in a letter to party workers dated September 1902.
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His notions of ‘democratic centralism’ were clear and well known, though not officially defined until a decade after his death in 1934: ‘(1) Application of the elective principle to all leading organs of the party from the highest to the lowest; (2) periodic accountability of the party organs to their respective party organizations; (3) strict party discipline and subordination of the minority to the majority;
(4) the absolutely binding character of the decision of the higher organs upon the lower organs and upon all party members.’
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Now the most obvious thing about this list is that (3) and especially (4) completely cancel out (1) and (2). That in fact had been Lenin’s practice. The Party Congress, though in theory sovereign, and meeting annually between 1917 and 1924, in fact took no leading part after its ratification of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918. It became a mere form, like the All-Russian Congress of Soviets. The Central Committee succeeded to its authority.

Lenin took advantage of the thrill of terror the Kronstadt mutiny had sent through the party to end any lingering notion of democracy within it. At the tenth Party Congress, which took place while the mutineers were still uncrushed, he told the delegates (9 March 1921) that the time had come to make the party monolithic: ‘We do not need any opposition now, comrades. Now is not the time. Either on this side or on that – with a rifle, not with the opposition! No more opposition now, comrades! The time has come to put an end to opposition, to put the lid on it. We have had enough opposition!’ They must end ‘the luxury of discussions and disputes’. It was ‘a great deal better to “discuss with rifles” than with the theses of the opposition’.
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Under the influence of this speech, and with the feeling perhaps that, if the mutiny succeeded, they would all be hanged in a fortnight, the comrades concentrated their minds wonderfully and passed a series of resolutions which gave Lenin everything he wanted. They included a secret rider, known as ‘Point Seven’, which gave the Central Committee ‘full powers … to apply all measures of party sanctions, including expulsion from the party’ when any ‘breach of discipline or revival or toleration of fractionalism’ took place. Such explusion would apply even to members of the cc, by a two-thirds vote, and the cc need not even refer the matter to the Congress, which thus abdicated. Moreover, ‘fractionalism’ was now created an offence on a par with ‘counter-revolution’, so that all the newly created forces of repression, hitherto reserved for enemies of the party, could now be used against party members, who would be tried and condemned in secret. Some of those present were fully aware of the risks. Karl Radek, who had bought Lenin that pair of shoes, told the Congress: In voting for this resolution, I feel that it can well be turned against us. And nevertheless I support it…. Let the Central Committee in a moment of danger take the severest measures against the best parry comrades if it find this necessary …. Let the Central Committee even be mistaken! That is less dangerous than the wavering which is now observable.’
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He knew that party democracy was signing its death-warrant. What he (and many, many
others present) did not realize was that he was signing his own actual death-warrant.

That was doubtless because the extent to which the Central Committee itself had forfeited power to small groups within it, including its own bureaucracy, was not yet generally realized, in even the higher reaches of the party. The party bureaucracy was a deliberate creation of Lenin’s. He had not merely a distrust but a positive loathing for the old imperial bureaucracy, not least because he felt compelled to use it. He wanted his own corps of officials, rather as the Tsars (again the sinister parallel) had developed a ‘Personal Chancery’ to get round the system of cabinet and responsible government.
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On 9 April 1919, in order to counter the ‘evils’ of the old bureaucracy, Lenin issued a decree setting up a People’s Commissariat of State Control, to keep a watchful eye over state officials, and replace them when necessary by reliable people. As the Commissar of this bureau he appointed Stalin – it was in fact Stalin’s first independent job of major importance.